Frustrations and Challenges

People get stressed out about things. Sounds obvious, but I've had several examples for me of people stressing, and affecting their choices and behaviors. One person is faced with a situation that seems to me like she is being asked to do something she knows how to do, but asked to do it a different way. A stressful and frustrating situation, no doubt. However, she has chosen (in the instance to which I was witness) to deal with the stress by taking a superior and exasperated attitude and tone of voice, and demanding answers to her questions, in specifics immediately. No doubt she deserves answers, and is justly frustrated. But it seemed like the way that she went about attempting to get those answers was counter productive to the specific situations, as well as putting the person she was asking on the spot, and in what could potentially have been an uncomfortable situation.

In a similar vein, but a different situation, I know that my Co-op teacher has been under a lot of stress in her personal life, things I won't go into. I have noticed they she seems to allow this to affect the way in which she interacts with students. Now I'm sure this is unavoidable in some situations, and obviously no one can completely control themselves, nor is anyone perfect. But things that she might tolerate under ordinary circumstances she reacts more strictly to. Students whose jokes and clowning she might laugh at, not get them a trip outside the door for a minute to calm down. Let me clarify, that I don't think she is over reacting to any of these off task behaviors, on the contrary, I think it is good that she is beginning to disallow some of the messing around. But, she is making a change in the way she deals with things, which might be difficult for students to adjust to. I imagine it is very difficult to avoid doing this sort of thing to a certain extent, so we will see how I do at this next month. I already know that there is one student in particular who annoys me so much I have no paitence for off task behavior from her, that I might tolerate in another student, and i have to work very hard to combat that, and not allow it to show.

The moral of the story is to find healthy ways to deal with frustration, or to not let things get to you at all. I'm trying, but I can always use more practice.

I ran into one other big challenge this week, as I was preparing to start my unit. This one has to do with teaching cooperatively with partner teachers, etc. But first a little bit of background. We have heterogeneous math classes, meaning there is no high and low class, it's a mix of all levels. However, we are still expected to differentiate for a multitude of student levels and abilities. In order to do that, one strategy that my school is implying is some splitting of the classes. So I will have half of my kids, and half of Mr. Smith's kids for a period of time, and then we will divide again, differently, or go back to the original classes. I'm not entirely sure how the whole thing will work, I'm just doing what they say, since I don't really have any clout in the matter. One of the biggest challenges of doing this though, is the two classes must absolutely stay 100% together, and must be consistent with what they teach. When you have one teacher for a whole year, it's ok to do something a little non-traditionally, or quirky, if it's what that teacher expects. But switching back and forth every few weeks, we have to have consistency. Now here comes the issue. When I learned to perform operations on fractions, we wrote the problem out horizontally, all on one line. We then did computations below and around the original problem. The way they do fractions at Briggs, is straight up and down, with the fractions stacked, you do the work only to the right of the problem. I've never seen this before. In fact, I wouldn't know about it now except I asked Mr. Smith to look over the pre-test I wrote up (since his students would take the same test too) and he told me to change some of them to that direction. I have found that it's been really tough for me to simply change the direction that I write equations. It makes sense, I understand it (though I like my way better), but I am going to have to be keeping myself in check for the next few weeks as I write equations out, that I am consistent with what the students have already learned, and will continue to learn after my unit is done.